PixelJunk Shooter - PS3

Game Description: In this subterranean adventure title, players must manipulate and deform the surrounding environments in order to rescue survivors that have been stranded throughout the levels. The game features a dynamic liquids system to generate realistic water, lava, and more, creating a unique and unpredictable puzzle experience.

PixelJunk Shooter Comic-Con 2009 Preview

I passed on PixelJunk Monsters because desktop tower defense games tend to bore me. I tried desperately to like PixeJunk Eden before finally declaring, "Hey, maybe this isn't for me." Disliking PixelJunk Eden is an unpopular choice, but it's never been a slight against the PixelJunk series, a personal theory proven true with my adoration for a spellbinding 15 minutes spent with PixelJunk Shooter.

While writing this preview, I started listing some of my reactions in the first few moments of picking up the controller -- beautiful, simple, elegant, addictive. It's these principles that have driven the previous PixeJunk games, traits I can recognize across all of them, even if the previous installments did nothing for me. To finally have a PixelJunk game speak to me, though, is a wonderful thing. I feel like I've finally joined an exclusive club. Pro tip: the club's worth the membership.

PixelJunk Shooter shared the same demo space as Gravity Crash at Sony's after hours Comic-Con showcase. Both are downloadable shooters with shared primary objectives of exploring cavernous surfaces, shooting things and saving helpless humans. It's a testament to both games, however, that each feels different.

Whereas Gravity Crash is hard focused on its shooting and navigation mechanics, PixelJunk Shooter has an added layer of interesting with environmental manipulation. You can understand how it works in a video or through words, but it's not until you're shooting a cavern apart with the twin sticks, watching the water drip through the cracks and cool the surrounding lava that it clicks, it works.

There are the makings of something special here. I'm not saying anything new or writing anything you haven't heard from the countless others who've sung the praises of PixelJunk Shooter. Bu even if you're someone who hasn't understood what all the PixelJunk fuss is about, keep PixelJunk Shooter on your radar. I was just like you. Then, I played PixelJunk Shooter. Trust me on this one.